Microsoft last week launched new versions of its database product, SQL Server, and its set of tools for software developers, Visual Studio.
Microsoft has been receiving a lot of flack recently for delays in releasing updates to its products - in particular of its ubiquitous PC operating system, Windows, which will arrive late next year - and SQL Server 2005 was no exception. It was originally slated for summer 2003, but Andy Lees, Microsoft's vice-president with responsibility for marketing its server products, believes that the delay was justified.
"We re-engineered our engineering in the middle of it," said Lees without a hint of irony, "because of security and quality, and I think that has paid dividends. If we had to take the decision to do what we've just done again, I'd do it every day of the week, particularly as we didn't see any slowdown in the meantime, as SQL Server 2000 is such a good product. It is our desire to offer more frequent upgrades going forward."
Lees suggested that customers could now expect new versions every two years or so, although he said that the company was not committing to that timeframe.
Microsoft now believes its database product - which allows organisations to store complex data and interrogate it in a meaningful way - is suitable for use by businesses of all sizes. A criticism of previous versions was that they did not scale to meet the performance required by large corporations. Microsoft released a number of test reports which showed that SQL Server 2005 could handle heavy workloads such as 93,000 concurrent users of an application from launch partner SAP.
Lees also pointed to the support from the manufacturers of mainframes - the workhorses that run the systems of large corporations - such as Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Unisys.
That puts Microsoft in direct competition with one of its perennial foes in the software world - Oracle. Oracle has long been number one in the database market, but following its recent round of acquisitions of major applications companies such as PeopleSoft and Siebel, Microsoft clearly senses an opportunity.
Oracle has a major development initiative underway, Project Fusion, to get all those applications - the software that sits on top of databases - working together, which means it might take its eye off its core market.
In his briefing with journalists, Lees took the opportunity to have a pop at Oracle - whether by name or through veiled references to its business model - at every available opportunity.
"We sell more databases than Oracle and IBM combined," he said. "We are only 20 per cent of the revenue. That's because we're cheaper and we didn't have high-end esoteric databases that run on esoteric hardware. Nowadays, we have that capability without the esoteric hardware and the esoteric prices."
Microsoft is also providing tools to help customers migrate from Oracle, as well as offering Oracle and IBM customers a 50 per cent discount on SQL Server 2005 if they make the switch.
An interesting feature of the new database is that it includes business intelligence built-in rather than as an extra add-on.
Business intelligence refers to the capability to analyse the information in a database and run meaningful management reports on it. "It turns out customers want to get data out as well as put data in," said Lees.
Microsoft has also simplified the licensing for companies running servers with multiple cores, ie more than one processor on a single chip, which is becoming a significant industry trend.
"Multiple cores is Moore's Law," explained Lees. "We cannot get the electrons to move around the chips any faster, therefore the way we are going to get performance is through multiple cores. When you add another core you don't [ necessarily] get twice the performance. It's still an increase but why would we then charge twice as much for the software?"
Amongst the early adopters of SQL Server 2005 in attendance was retail giant Musgraves, who Lees says is using the product to gather inventory from all its stores and make better decisions about where to move inventory.
